seemed satisfied that Marsh had recovered himself, he had Marsh go on with his description.

His senseless fear having gone now, Marsh looked down calmly, entranced as the features of the United States passed below his gaze. He named the cities he could identify, also the mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers, explaining just how they looked from 350 miles up. In only a fraction of an hour’s time, the rocket had traversed the entire country and was approaching the twinkling phosphorescence of the Atlantic.

Marsh asked if “Tom” and “Dick” had landed safely.

“‘Tom’ landed near Roswell, New Mexico,” General Forsythe told him, “and the ’chute of the second section has been reported seen north of Dallas. I think you’d better start back now, Marshall. It’ll take us many months to analyze all the information we’ve gotten. We can’t contact you very well on the other side of the world either, and thirdly, I don’t want you exposed to the sun’s rays outside the atmosphere in the Eastern Hemisphere any longer than can be helped.”

Marsh tugged carefully on his safety line and floated slowly back toward the ship. He entered the air lock. Then, inside, he raised the angle of his contour chair to upright position, facing the console of the ship’s manual controls for the glide Earthward. He plugged in his telemeter helmet cable and buckled one of the straps across his waist.

Since he was still moving at many thousands of miles an hour, it would be suicide to plunge straight downward. He and the glider would be turned into a meteoric torch. Rather, he would have to spend considerable time soaring in and out of the atmosphere in braking ellipses until he reached much lower speed. Then the Earth’s gravitational pull would do the rest.

This was going to be the trickiest part of the operation, and the most dangerous. Where before, Marsh had depended on automatic controls to guide him, now much of the responsibility was on his own judgment. He remembered the many hours he had sweated through to log his flying time. Now he could look back on that period in his training and thank his lucky stars for it.

He took the manual controls and angled into the atmosphere. He carefully watched the AHF dial—the atmospheric heat friction gauge. When he had neared the dangerous incendiary point, with the ship having literally become red-hot, he soared into the frictionless vacuum again. He had to keep this up a long time in order to reduce his devastating 

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